In its prime, there was no better unschooling resource.
Sandra Dodd, biased perhaps, but honest
Always Learning grew out of arguments on the unschooling discussion list then owned by Home Education Magazine. It was a list associated with Unschooling.com. Unschooling.com was conceived in early 1999, and solidified in discussions at a private conference in Minneapolis, at which I was present. It had to do with the then-recent AOL changes in which many of us who were "volunteers" in their forum were replaced by non-homeschooling AOL volunteers (it was an AOL-credit-for-time deal in the days that online access on AOL was $3 an hour). Home Education Magazine made a forum with a message board, but they wanted the unschooling area to be bland and non-controversial, so then they made unschooling.com as a place for me and other radical unschoolers to be. I was a columnist in the magazine and had a following. The politics were personal and unpredictable, and things kept on changing over all those years.
The first post in this group was Kids and Spirituality, begun by Deb Lewis, November 24, 2001, with responses by several people who are still around, and others I remember very fondly.
Other early discussions involved expensive games, "the elusive exchange rate of non-monetary values," 4yo reading questions, Toddler Eating, fantasy gaming vs real challenges, Play Value and toys, Re: beans and babies in the store... (Pam Sorooshian's great solution for keeping little girls happy and peaceable in grocery stores.) Some very good things right away.
The group grew quickly and has stayed active. Some months there were only a couple of posts a day or so (64 messages in December 2004, 76 in March 2005) but more often there were 600 or more, and a few times over 1000.
You can see at the bottom of the main page the total number of posts by month.
(Groups.io kindly preserved that historical graph so the migrating groups could still look at stats. Sweet of them. You can see where the group became less active after I wrote what's above, for a while, partly because Facebook was thriving, and yahoogroups was becoming more clunky.)
On October 16, 2019, yahoogroups announced that it would quickly phase out, and the archives would be deleted by December 14, 2019.
The group was 18 years old.
Some of the commentary on the fear of the group's demise is here. We WERE able to migrate to a new home at groups.io.
